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Af redaktionen 02-04 2009 - 07:09

The Rock Foundation has awarded $1.5 million (8.5 million Danish kroner) to a project at the National Museum in Denmark that centres on Arctic immigration 4,500 years ago

The Carpenter-Melgaard Endowment will be used for work centring around the artefacts and research material collected by the famous Danish Arctic researcher, Jørgen Meldgaard (1927-2007).

Meldgaard, who started working academically with Arctic research in 1946 and who continued to do so until 1996 when he was officially pensioned from his post as Museum inspector for the National Museum’s Ethnographic Collection, left behind an academic treasure trove of books, notes, photographs and films documenting and relating information relating to immigration in central Canada and eastern Greenland, as well as general information about life among the Inuit.

As well as his work at Denmark’s National Museum, Meldgaard was central in establishing the National Museum in Nuuk, Greenland. His services to research and knowledge of Greenland, not least Inuit art, resulted in his being awarded the home rule government medal for services to Greenland.

Meldgaard never managed to publish his material, and this is the task that the Arctic Centre, of the Danish National Museum’s Ethnographic Collection, will now take on, enabled by the recent financial award.

Bjarne Grønnow, researcher and head of Greenland Research at the National Museum for the last ten years, will head the project that will begin in May this year.

The project will initially have two researchers working on it, but it is hoped that it will develop into a wider project with research workers from Denmark, Greenland and Canada.